The difficult, sometimes depressing, or the wonderful, sometimes extra special, "thing" about the holiday season is the coming together of family and friends.  It is that time of year that those that do come together arrive at the occasion or occasions with all that they are.  They bring their up-to-date hearsays, their laden drenched gossip personas from the year before, they bring their baggage of life's trials and tribulations, and they bring their willingness to toss everything up in the air in the family/friend focused deliberation of "the coming together". 

For me what is central to the holiday season being successful is the "feel" or perception of feeling that I take away from each of these events.  Did everyone pitch in their part?  Did everyone sacrifice enough of themselves to benefit the goodwill of the whole?  Did everyone come away with a sense of fulfillment of interacting with others?  Did everyone take away from the occasion that they played an important part in the enrichment in the lives of others present, or at least enough of the others present to "feel" justified in attending?  Certainly family and friends understand that the "coming together" takes on a life of it's own.  Sometimes we as individuals though certainly do not recognize this, and worse still is that we do understand it and do our damndest to brink our link in that chain that strives to hold it together.

Oh what a dilemma…..dare I say, what if instead of coming together, all of the baggage and excess immaterial objects land dead center in the nucleus of coming together?  Uuuuuggghhhhh, that could be icky….

Hmmmm……I'm not taking away a sense of fulfillment of at least the Thanksgiving holiday season, other than the entirely too many pieces of pecan pie that I ate...